As electronic devices become more pervasive in our daily lives, the need for higher volumes and tighter quality control continues to increase. Electronics devices, such as computer systems or cellular phones, rely on microelectronic devices for their key functions and features. Microelectronic devices, such as semiconductor chips, are typically fabricated with defined production flows. The intention is that production flows processed on different combinations of components will each produce batches of identical products. Typically, each of these products is made by utilizing a multitude of recipes, where each recipe may be thought of as a set of predefined process parameters required for a reproducible processing outcome.
Semiconductor chips include millions of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices, such as MOS field effect transistors (MOSFET) or MOS transistors. Predicting performance, such as in characterization, of MOS transistors is critical to validating or verifying the integrated circuit design for a manufacturing process. The circuit design is compared to actual integrated circuit devices to ensure a working resulting integrated circuit device. Capacitance-voltage measurement is fundamental to determining the device performance of the MOS transistors. As manufacturing processes and technologies are improved, the device sizes of the MOS transistors continue decreasing as well as the transistor's gate insulation or gate oxide becoming thinner.
The thinner gate oxide has caused gate capacitance or load much more difficult to determine. A thinner insulator in a MOS transistor results in exponential increases in stray current, such as direct tunneling leakage current, and forces opposing transistor switching, such as parasitic capacitances of the MOS device. These extreme increases in inefficiencies of the MOS transistor can no longer be ignored. Producing expected integrated circuits has become increasingly difficult and unpredictable. Instead of producing more integrated circuit devices, the difficulty in designing predictable integrated circuit devices has resulted in fewer of the integrated circuit devices that meet the performance or functions required.
Attempts to predict performance of the MOS transistor have included adjustments to extracted data, such as parametric data, and software applications, such as integrated circuit simulators. These adjustments only address the symptoms and do not address the cause, so the adjustments introduce additional variability and inaccuracies. The additional variability and inaccuracies result in more if not all inoperable integrated circuit devices and/or significantly larger integrated circuit device dimensions thereby eliminating the benefits of improved, smaller technologies. Other unsuccessful attempts to predict performance have included integrated circuit testing strategies requiring higher cost, increased time, larger area, or additional complexity.
Thus, a need still remains for an integrated circuit system to improve integrated circuit modeling, performance, and size. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, coupled with the technical imperatives of improved die-to-die variation and improved production efficiency, it is critical that answers be found for these problems. Competitive pressures also demand lower costs alongside improved efficiencies and performance.
Solutions to these problems have been sought but prior developments have eluded those skilled in the art.